PokerStars Founder Isai Scheinberg Profiled in Canadian Business

CanadianBusiness.com has a riveting story on the man who started the world’s largest online poker site, PokerStars.com. 

Here we get a rare glimpse of Isai Scheinberg, who opened PokerStars from Toronto, Canada the same day two planes his the World Trade Center in Downtown Manhattan, September 11, 2001.  At that time, Paradise Poker pretty much dominated the online poker scene.

The CanadianBusiness piece delves into how Scheinberg would fly in private jets between Canada and Europe as a way of avoiding a potential emergency landing in the US while PokerStars accepted players from the States.

Scheinberg believed, based on legal opinion, that it was safe to target US citizens with an online poker site.  He later found out the hard way via an April 2011 indictment that this was not necessarily the case.

Scheinberg was a masterful tactician, and he was prepared for something like this. He didn’t travel to America, and when he shuttled between the Isle of Man and Toronto, where he originally founded the company, he flew on a private jet to better avoid an emergency landing or unplanned diversion to an American airport, according to those who worked with him. (The company says he flew only once on a private plane along this route.) In the past, Scheinberg solicited law firms for opinions on the legality of online poker, and did so again after UIGEA. The law, he was told, didn’t apply to online poker. He was already of the opinion that existing laws only affected games of chance, like blackjack and roulette. In Scheinberg’s mind, and in those of his lawyers’, poker was a game of skill, much like chess, another game he was fond of. He saw no reason to stop serving U.S. citizens. But he did need to consider the handful of American executives he employed, and, leading up to UIGEA’s passage, asked them if they could stay with the company and forgo travelling back home, the consequence of challenging muddy U.S. laws. Not everyone was prepared to do so. But armed with his legal opinions, Scheinberg had made his decision: he went all in.

This is a good read.  Be sure to check it out here.

- Patrick Flanagan, Gambling911.com